A Subject Worth Losing Sleep Over

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, March 25, 2001

SLEEP DEMONS

There's nothing that brings out the poetry in a writer like the unattainable.

Maybe that's why the writing in Bill Hayes' memoir is so evocative. Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, pursues sleep as avidly and lyrically as Nabokov pursued butterflies. In the pages of "Sleep Demons: An Insomniac's Memoir," he lays bare a life obsessed with nighttime slumber and suffused with daytime drowsiness.

From his childhood episodes of sleepwalking to his sleepless adult nights, Hayes examines the major elements of his life -- the dawning of sexuality, a college year spent in Florence, coming out to his family, taking care of a partner with HIV -- all through the scrim of his insomnia.

But "Sleep Demons" is also much more than a memoir. Hayes takes us along on a quest to find the answers to his sleep-deprived questions. A tireless researcher, Hayes integrates mythology, journalism, the history of sleep research and his own philosophy into "Sleep Demons." He even conducts his own sleep study, placing an ad in the New York Times looking for stories from people with insomnia or other sleep disorders.

Hayes skillfully interweaves these elements. Each chapter looks at a topic related to sleep disorders that dovetails with an episode from his life. In the "Caffeinism" chapter, for example, Hayes explores the chemistry and effects of everyone's favorite stimulant and looks back at the years his father ran the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Spokane, Wash., Hayes' childhood home.

It's one of the most entertaining chapters, filled with anecdotes from a youth fizzy with almost unlimited access to soft drinks -- "There were some limits to our consumption. No pop for breakfast, as I recall, although it was permitted while watching Saturday morning cartoons" -- juxtaposed with nuggets of information like the fact that Parkinson's disease in men may be prevented by high caffeine intake.

Other chapters detail beds and bed theory (including a tour of San Francisco's McRoskey Airflex Mattress Co., the last place in the United States where you can get a made-to-order innerspring mattress), jet lag, dreams and nocturnal erections, which, according to 19th century sleep researcher William Alexander Hammond, "are usually unaccompanied by venereal disease."

Aside from Hayes, one character reappears again and again, through almost every chapter of the book: Nathaniel Kleitman, who, Hayes notes, revolutionized the study of sleep. Hayes is fascinated by Kleitman, who was a rigorous researcher unafraid of using his own body as a laboratory.

As a doctoral student in the 1920s, Kleitman kept himself awake for five days straight, and in 1938 he and an assistant spent 32 days in Mammoth Cave, Ky. (also the subject of Davis McCombs' recent prize-winning poetry collection,

"Ultima Thule"), testing his theories about the 24-hour circadian cycle of sleep and waking. "Clearly, Kleitman had the soul of an insomniac," Hayes observes dryly.

Kleitman's sleepless spirit comes along as Hayes moves to San Francisco and settles in the Castro in the mid-1980s. Hayes perfectly evokes those early years of AIDS, when fear and desire were ever-present:

"I can see myself walking up Eighteenth Street in the middle of the night. I glance up: there, on the third floor of that Victorian, a naked man appears in the window. I stop to look but in a blink he's gone. . . . The neighborhood was fed by these images, made more intensely alive by them. Darkness hid signs of illness, turning a ravaged city into a tense erotic dreamscape, and infected bodies into unblemished ones."

@hs,10.5 And still Hayes cannot sleep. The mid-1990s find him in a demanding job and caring for his partner, whose T-cell count is dropping. The stress begins to mount, making his insomnia that much worse.

As his lover sleeps ever longer, his body trying to shore up its defenses, Hayes becomes desperate:

"I lay awake next to Steve and thought, I would steal an hour of his sleep if I could. I would slip beneath his eyelids and yank it right out of him."

Like a deus ex machina, protease inhibitors arrive just in time to allow Hayes' lover the pleasure of having "Sleep Demons" dedicated to him. Hayes' own rescue from insomnia is less clear, although by the end he has cobbled together a peace accord with the disorder.

By leavening the personal with the scientific, Bill Hayes avoids that navel- gazing common to many life stories. Hayes has created something that goes beyond mere memoir; call it obsessional autobiography.

With its eccentric form, "Sleep Demons" could have ended up just too precious or quirky. But Hayes' polished writing and fearless revelations make it work beautifully.

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